Publish the costs or pay the price

While Westminster obsesses over Ruth Kelly's survival battle and weighs the consequences for Tony Blair's schools reform plans next month, away from the spotlight the government is already shipping water on another of its flagship bills. The identity cards bill took three big hits in the House of Lords on Monday - on costs, on security of personal details and on access to data - which could effectively cripple the project for the foreseeable future unless they can be reversed in the Commons. Yet the chances of that happening are slim and getting slimmer. Labour's majority already fell to 25 during the bill's Commons stage last year. Now, with the case and coalition against ID cards growing in confidence every day, it may be even harder to hold Labour's ranks together on the issue, especially when it comes to reversing the key Lords amendment, which demands a proper costs audit for the project.

The issues of principle at the heart of the ID cards bill remain unchanged. Identity cards are a restraint on liberty which can only be justified on grounds both of necessity and practicality (including cost) before deserving very cautious support. But the government has failed to prove the case for necessity - ministers still cannot make up their minds whether the cards are needed to deal with terrorism, or with everyday crime or as a proof of entitlement to benefits; as time goes on that case gets ever hazier. During the course of the bill's progress through parliament, however, the government has also failed to make the practicality case. Anyone who takes the trouble to read this week's Lords debates will quickly get the point. The longer the scrutiny has continued, the more dubious the case has appeared on grounds of size, complexity and cost and the more troubling the government's attempts to evade proper informed debate.

This week's focus on costs is not some dry issue of project management. The scale, and therefore the cost, of the ID cards project is enormous. As a new report by Corporate Watch argues, the plan pushes the bounds of public procurement projects based on experimental technology to the very limits - and the limits, what is more, both of Whitehall's ability to commission and of the IT sector's ability to tender and deliver. Even by the Home Office's own estimates - which almost no one else outside the department believes - the total cost is about £6bn over 10 years. All other estimates, including by the London School of Economics, put the total much higher, possibly as high as £19bn or even £24bn. But who knows? As Lord Crickhowell said on Monday, the only certainties are that costs are growing and that in the end they will be far higher than anything the government now says. This week the LSE restated that its figures were sound, while complaining that the government's secretive approach now makes an informed and independent debate impossible. Given the scale and importance of the project, as well as the issues of principle at stake, this is a charge of which ministers should be well and truly ashamed.

As the Lords debate showed, the ID card argument highlights a wider structural problem for efforts to ensure parliamentary scrutiny of public procurement projects in general. Ministers are refusing to give parliament their costings - or even their tender requirements - because, they argue, it is commercially sensitive information which could prevent the public from getting the best deal when the project is put out to tender. But this inescapably means that MPs and peers - and the public - are being asked, as Lord Phillips of Sudbury put it in the debate, to buy a pig in a poke. As Lord Phillips pointed out, this makes it a constitutional issue. The Lords are right. Unless parliament is given proper costings first, this bill must not go ahead. If the government goes ahead with its aim to reverse the new clause in the Commons, MPs should vote it down.